Dispatches from the Republic of Letters
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First and foremost, I would like to express my appreciation for this important and unexpected prize in the name of my husband, Darwin “Bud” Flakoll, who passed away some years ago. I am profoundly gra... -
Which Claribel Alegría should I speak of today? The fiction writer, the chronicler of history, the storyteller, the political activist, the translator, or the poet? After years of reading her work (a... -
The magazine Books Abroad was founded by Roy Temple House in 1927 with the idea of serving the university, state, and international communities, aiming for excellence as a literary publicatio... -
There is a wooden house / on the plain of Oklahoma. / Each night the house turns / into an island of the Baltic Sea, / a stone that fell from a fabled sky. / Burnished by Astrid’s glances, / ignited... -
In all languages there are limpid words which are like air and the water of the spirit. To express such words is always marvelous and furthermore necessary, like breathing. One such word is gracia... -
The poet Derek Walcott remarked recently, “The greatest writers have been at heart parochial, provincial in their rootedness. . . Shakespeare remains a Warwickshire country boy; Joyce a minor bourgeo... -
García Márquez has invented a fantastic imaginary country of his own with its pertinent mythology of persons and events, recurrent in all his books, linked by allusion, with themes taken up and carr... -
García Márquez has studied and read more English than French or Italian, yet perfectly fluent in the latter two, he is hesitant to speak English. Why? “Because the English sentence is too simple,” he... -
In February 1970, with the transmission of a telegram from Norman, Oklahoma, to a correspondent of La Nazione newspaper in Florence, Italy (“Ungaretti winner Books Abroad Prize please inform Na... -
In 1974, when Francis Ponge received the third Neustadt International Prize for Literature, he made comments that have become part of the aura of the prize. He called it “perfectly magnificent,” “so o... -
Norman, Oklahoma, sounded to many a European ear as Persepolis or Samarkand once may have done to Marlowe or to Keats: the name of a remote, half fairy-like city from which the broadest-minded review...
